


In the sunlight (I'm shaking like it's dark).

by chippedcookie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 07:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9983279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chippedcookie/pseuds/chippedcookie
Summary: “A cake?” 605 looks a bit startled, but he opens the door more to show the inside of what might look like a studio apartment of a college student, if not for the clearly expensive and artfully aged pieces that seem to have been scattered around the room by a tornado.“It's Anjou pear cake,” Joonmyeon explains, again, because it seems important that this cake has an actual name. He likes it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> -very brief and non descriptive mentions of violence.  
> -I was sick this weekend and tried to finish some stuff

The building is OK on the outside and kind of nice on the inside. At least the walls are mostly the same color. The fact that it is a very unsettling shade of green can be put aside. The moving company filled the space with the new furniture he ordered and all his other stuff is stacked in neat boxes with their corners all straight. They're labeled, _kitchen, bedroom, bathroom_ , and Joonmyeon doesn't give himself time to ponder too much on them. The whole point of this is that he has time now.

 

 

 

 

 

The typewriter had been a birthday present wrapped in Christmas-y wrapping paper and with an Easter card tucked in one of the folds. _Happy birthday, now you can fit in with the cool kidz at the home._ She always thought she was funnier than she actually was. He still has the card in the box labeled _stuff._ Memorabilia was too impersonal, memories too personal. He sets the typewriter by the window, puts in a blank page. The itch is there, never left, but he has a hard time to follow it where it may led him. He swears he is pressing random keys just to hear the sound they make, but in the end they still spell her name.

 

 

 

 

 

He has time, that was the deal, but it's not like he can just drop off the face of earth. He shops, sends snaps of whatever he's eating to those who may care and to those who may bug him about it. He buys a professional coffee maker and makes his own pretentious coffee at home. He could retire on what he has already made, but the feeling of being remembered just for that haunts him and more than once he finds himself sitting in front of the typewriter – a new page in – with his pretentious coffee trying to find that safe place again. Violated, burnt to the ground, he is not even sure a place like that exists anymore.

The page stays empty.

 

 

 

 

 

The neighborhood is a nice one, anonymous enough that he can just be the guy from 505. His face was on the news maybe twice before his manager hired the PR equivalent of a SWAT team and his candid disappeared from the morning news. He wasn't that famous to begin with and very few people that knew him could have made bank on something like _that_. And did he mention the PR SWAT team? Yes, that helped too. Anyway, here he is 505 who doesn't really work and borders on shut-in, and that's all anyone bothers to remember about him. Going back to being unremarkable never felt so... good.

 

 

 

 

On Day Unknown of his prolonged vacation he sits in front of the typewriter with his pretentious coffee and looks outside the window. Fifth floor view isn't all that much, but he still gets a glimpse of the darkening sky and the lights turning on on the skyline. He stares until the lights look like fireflies and the pollution turns the sky of a sickly tone between orange and gray, but still no words. He hears a commotion on the floor right above his and then music and then... _clank clank clank._ Rhythmic, following the music with a tune of their own, as if they were dancing. _Clank clank clank._

 

 

 

 

 

 _Clank clank clank._ The sound seems to accompany him through most nights and some late afternoons along with the muffled sounds of a stereo playing what one day he recognizes as Edith Piaf. At some point he remembers his mother trying to learn french, books stacked on the kitchen table, while old cassettes played soft music through the whole house.

 _Clank clank clank_. It starts with his foot bouncing along, then it travels up, and up and up until his fingers drum against his cup of pretentious coffee and then... and then over they keys of the typewriter.

 

 

 

 

_Clank clank clank. The rain kept hitting the window and somehow he knew he wasn't alone._

 

 

 

 

 

The knock on his door comes as unexpected. His Amazon delivery shouldn't be due for another two days and he is not really waiting for any visits either. Time and all that. Up until a few months ago he'd dreaded the sound of the doorbell, the sound of his phone ringing. The knocking comes again, three quick raps. He can see the door from where he is standing, blue and thick like he asked it to be. _Knock knock knock. Clank clank clank._

The person on the other side is a small barefoot man.

 

“I got your mail by accident,” he says waving two envelopes in front of Joonmyeon's face. “I'm 605.”

 

 

 

 

_Non je ne regrette rien_

_C'est payé, balayé, oublié._

_Je me fous du passé!_

 

 

 

 

The farmers market is open everyday in the early morning. He is no morning person, but fresh vegetables seem like a good reason as any to get up before noon these days. Seven thirty finds him juggling his keys and a tumbler of hot pretentious coffee for the ten minutes walk to the farmers market. 605 has been silent for a couple of days and Joonmyeon found himself missing it yesterday while he sat in front of his typewriter with no rhythm to follow, no story to chase.

 

 

 

 

The door clicks closed, he pockets the keys and has a moment to panic before he finds his phone in his _other_ back pocket. With age – though someone would disagree – he became one of those that hate being so dependent on technology, but isn't so sure how to implement pigeon messaging in his everyday life. Never mind the fact that he hates pigeons. That brought him to think about other kinds of birds that could deliver messages and then to his grandma's cat that used to bring dead birds on her windowsill as presents, totally missing 605 coming his way.

 

 

 

 

“Hello,” 605 has an unfairly symmetrical face. “Up early?”

 

“Farmer's market,” he says, showing the Eco-friendly bag he got after feeling ashamed of himself in front of all those Eco-friendly old ladies at the market. His books already cut down on the planet's oxygen enough, he cannot be any more selfish than that.

 

“Oh,” 605 says, his eyes moving slowly from the bag to Joonmyeon's coffee to Joonmyeon's face. “They have the best apricots.”

 

“And zucchini,” 605's eyes widen at that, then he nods enthusiastically. “You should try Miss Q's pears, she always has the best ones.”

 

“I will.”

 

A less awkward than one would expect silence follows, Joonmyeon feels every second of it like the scratch of a nail over a blackboard. 605 is still very gracious about it, keeping up a slight smile that makes it all the more obvious how Joonmyeon still has a long way to go before gaining back his smoothness. If there had ever been any to recover in the first place.

 

“Bye, Joonmyeon.” 605 rises a hand, waving as he starts taking the last flight of stairs up to the sixth floor.

 

“Have a good day,” he says, raising his cup in an awkward toast to creepy neighbors all over the world who are unable to make small talk.

 

 

 

 

 

The music comes back around three that afternoon. The sun hits the living room window bouncing off the walls and setting the temperature outside on a nice 18 degrees Celsius, at least according to the thermometer on his windowsill. Cold enough to rise goosebumps on his skin once he opens the window to let the music in. The zucchini sit on the kitchen counter along with pears from Miss Q. No one is dancing this afternoon, not even his fingers on the keys of the typewriter, but it doesn't feel like loosing, it feels more like a break.

 

 

 

 

_...and the door opened under his hands with ticks and humpfs and claks and booms, and what he found inside was more than just astounding._

 

 

 

 

 

Time is a strange concept. He needed some and he asked for it, like his time were someone else's property. Crunched down in front of his oven, Joonmyeon feels that time is mostly tricky when it came to the amount of it you should put into making something even remotely resembling an Anjou pear cake. So far so good, when the timer beeps and he scrambles for an oven mitt. The recipe said twenty-five minutes. It looks nice, nicer that he would have thought, almost _pretty_ if he could dare say. There is music upstairs, a light melody and no sounds of dancing, Joonmyeon can relate. This is the kind of music you bask in the sunlight with, lazy and with your stomach full of Anjou pear cake. Or at least he hopes so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“A cake?” 605 looks a bit startled, but he opens the door more to show the inside of what might look like a studio apartment of a college student, if not for the clearly expensive and artfully aged pieces that seem to have been scattered around the room by a tornado.

 

“It's Anjou pear cake,” Joonmyeon explains, again, because it seems important that this cake has an actual name. He likes it.

 

“Of course,” 605 says, looking thoughtfully at the round golden disk, Joonmyeon has gracefully slid on the only plate in the house big enough to hold it. The cake covers it very embarrassing design and Joonmyeon is under no illusion that they will eat enough of his first attempt at baking anything that didn't come out of a box enough to unveil it. The silence goes on, 605's eyes don't leave the cake and Joonmyeon's don't leave him.

 

“I think it would go lovely with my tea.” of course his hallway crush has pretentious tea to go with Joonmyeon's poor attempts at flirting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jongdae – that is 605's name – has a collection of CDs he inherited, a couch he exchanged for a bike in New Zealand and mismatched everything because every time he moved he always got too impatient and only brought one each of whatever he had and could fit into a backpack. All of this he says with a slight smile and a funny, yet appropriate story. Joonmyeon laughs, asks questions and would like to stab his optimism in the dick for letting him think that he could do this, share tiny bits, work around the elephant and the hippo and the fucking lion that ate his life. He tries though, and when they do finish the cake, at least, he has his own little story to tell about that time he was in a souvenir shop and he had a friend that thought they were funnier than they actually were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_The silence feels as thick as his mother's winter sweater, but not as welcoming. It is dark and cold and has hands gripping him from all sides, stealing his words, his voice, his soul._

 

 

 

 

 

 _Clank clank clank._ It begins again the next day, around ten, but there is no music to go along with the pattern of dancing shoes. Joonmyeon always has a cup of pretentious coffee ready and he takes it sitting in front of his typewriter, closing his eyes to imagine Jongdae moving along with it in the open space of the 605. The page is almost filled with words written in thick black ink that sometimes stains. _Clank clank clank._

It stops suddenly and Joonmyeon thinks about putting on some music himself, opening the window and let the crisp midwinter air grip him tight and bring him where the end of this story is, where all his words that have been stolen are waiting for him to bring them back. He could be ready. He could. The knocking on the door is unexpected, and Jongdae standing there with muffins even more so.

 

“I should have some coffee to go with those,” he says, because of course he has pretentious coffee to go with Jongdae's attempts to reciprocate Joonmyeon's poor pastry flirting.

 

“I'm on break,” Joonmyeon replies at Jongdae's carefully worded inquiry about what Joonmyeon might do with all that free time, besides attempting to reenact the life of a 50s housewife. “I am a writer.”

It sounds illogically like a lie to his own ears.

 

Jongdae doesn't ask the next logical question about what Joonmyeon might be writing, followed by all those others that Joonmyeon took a time off from, like _Have I ever read something of yours?_ He looks at the typewriter and smiles, cutting up a muffin in a half and offering the bigger half to Joonmyeon with a wink. The giggle that comes out of his throat is a bit more unrefined than what he was going for, the airy laugh he was forced to try in front of a mirror that one time before a date. Still, it makes Jongdae smile.

 

 

 

 

 

Joonmyeon's attempts at culinary flirting take a step forward when Jongdae knocks on his door with a bottle from the nicer row of wines at the store down the road ,and asks if Joonmyeon has anything to go with it. Joonmyeon does, in fact, have lots of things to go with Jongdae's bottle of fine wine, starting with a smile. Then he has an old radio that he has been dragging around apartments since his first tiny tin can apartment back in college, he has cook books and zucchini and his two left hands in this weird cooking dance. They sprinkle olive oil, cut vegetables and sear the filet, while Jongdae pours generous glasses of wine in coffee mugs, because Joonmyeon is peculiar about his pretentious coffee, but knows next to nothing about wine etiquette.

 

“It is basically grown up juice, anyway,” Jongdae muses looking at the bottom of his empty cup. Sprawled on Joonmyeon's couch with his feet propped up on the coffee table. Joonmyeon is folded on the other end, his mug filled with coffee after their meal.

 

“My sister took a somelier class once,” he stopped drinking some time ago, he cannot blame alcohol for this sudden need to reminisce. “No one told her she was supposed to spit after each tasting and got drunk at the first lesson.”

 

Jongdae laughs, dropping a little more on the couch. “Really?”

 

“She also rented a dog for my seventh birthday,” he feels Jongdae's fingers circle lazily around his ankle. It feels reassuring, while Joonmyeon dives head first into the ocean of memories he has kept at bay until now. “She gave two PB&J to the neighbor's son for two hours with his golden retriever.”

 

Jongdae's hand travels up his calf, “She was far braver than I am.” Joonmyeon whispered.

 

 

 

_When the door was wide open and he dared to take a step inside he found that his nightmares still followed, but their voices were far quieter._

 

 

 

Somehow – though Joonmyeon has a good hunch – Joonmyeon's old radio migrated to Jongdae's apartment. Jongdae put it on a shelf beside some of his mother's records, and it plays whatever station it chooses as the two of them soak up the sun rays coming in from the window.

Joonmyeon holds their twined hands on his full stomach and Jongdae is reading something aloud, though, Joonmyeon stopped listening once the sun got high enough to reach his face and made it so easy to fall asleep.

 

“Let's go take a walk,” Jongdae tugs his hand shaking him from his hand and closing his book with a loud thump. “Come on.”

 

Joonmyeon doesn't need much coaxing, though he was already happy enough right where he was. Jongdae pockets a few snacks and the book he was reading, stuffing the pickets of his coat comically full. Joonmyeon snorts and checks his wallet for enough change to buy both of them something hot from the cafe near their usual destination.

There is a comfort in this pocket he created in his life for the things he and Jongdae do together, like a hot pack that warms him when he is sitting in front of his typewriter and his coffee has long since gone cold. It makes him stupid sometimes, like how he'd rather let their hands bump occasionally than hold his hand, because it makes Jongdae laugh at him with fondness, as he teases him for acting like a crushing teenager.

The newsstand at the end of the road is open. There is a man buying the paper and a couple of kids looking at comics covers, murmuring between themselves. Joonmyeon is looking at the kids because he remembers doing just that, with his hands in his pockets to avoid touching one of those shiny covers without permission with hands sticky from candy. He is looking at them and suddenly his eyes are drawn towards the shiny cover of a magazine just over their heads. There is something about the weather and then something else about a new movie and then just under it, _Smith's murders. A look inside the murderer's mid_.

It feels like someone just punched his breath right out of him, just as a hole opened under his feet and dragged him down down down, back to that dark place it took him so long to escape. He is back in that empty hallway curled on himself, trying to breath with his mouth because the smell of disinfectant makes him heave and it's not even him they're cutting open but everything hurts. So. Fucking. Much. He hasn't realized Jongdae is calling him until he yanks on his coat sleeve, hard enough to jostle him.

Jongdae is holding his face, his hands are cold and help a little bit. They smell like chocolate because they ate chocolate cake some time before leaving the house, and they are cold because they are outside and its still too early for spring to be as warm as he likes. He is right here, halfway between his apartment and the park, a thousand odd days from that hallway.

 

“Yea, I'm here.” his voice comes out more like a squeak and that makes him laugh. Jongdae smiles at him, but it's tight and out of this, Jongdae's smile is what makes him want to cry.

 

“I think we should go home,” Jongdae says for them both.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Explaining it after such a long time doesn't feel better than it did when he was sitting on the edge of a depressingly maroon couch with a clock ticking like a park meter. He knows how to talk about it now. So he says that when he was a kid he used to like creative writing and Goosebumps and how that, somehow, became his job.

 

“After, they told me that mail like that used to come all the time,” he says, frowning at a loose thread in his sweatpants. Jongdae made them a fort, with blankets and food and there is no light on, just candles that smell like cinnamon. “People saying that they thought what I wrote was more than... saying that they wanted to duplicate what I had written in real life because that is what my writing... what my writing.... deserved.... ”

 

 _He_ never wrote and they found the first victim on the anniversary of his first book's release. Laying on dusty carpet, just as John Smith had described. Then everyone wanted a copy of _Kevin Smith_ 's book, they all wanted to know and when he saw his picture on the news he thought almost puked out all his lunch and breakfast and dinner going back a week. Sleep came and went, but he didn't miss it when it wouldn't come. Nightmares were... nothing he could ever put into words.

The second victim was found two weeks later.

 

“They had me locked up in my apartment,” locked doors, locked windows. “My agent released a statement, but then they said silence was the best way.”

 

It had been, until the guy had found a way to hit closer, to wrap his hands around his heart and yank it out, show him just how powerful words were. “She was the only family I had left.”

 

Jongdae doesn't rub his back, doesn't pat his shoulder or try to hold his hand. Standing on his knees, he wraps himself around Joonmyeon. As tiny as he is, as Joonmyeon listens to the furious beating of his heart, Jongdae feels large to hide him from the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's dark outside. There is some mellow music on that makes Joonmyeon sway his hips as he cuts up vegetables in as even cubes as he can, just like the picture. He is very ungraceful doing both the cutting and the swaying, but he is training himself to look at the good side of things. His fridge is filled with fresh vegetables, he is trying new things like cooking and folding his laundry.

 _Clank clank clank_. The sound follows the rhythm of the music playing from his stereo and Joonmyeon holds his breath as he listens to the sequence, _clank clank clank_. From the top shelf, he grabs a tupperware and dumps all the vegetables he cut in there, putting them away in the fridge for later. He did promise to cook dinner, after all. For now, though, he turns up the stereo before making his way up one flight of stairs to go knock on a very familiar door.

Jongdae opens the door with a smile, reaching for Joonmyeon's hand. “Come in,” he says, already dragging him inside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_...and with the sound of his steps echoing in the empty room, he found that some things he could not keep. So held hands with the darkness and they danced the slow dance of lovers that are about to say goodbye._

 


End file.
